


smokestack

by kaijublood



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: F/F, I WANTED IT TO BE, Police, THERES NO FIXING THIS although i want to fix it okay MR SIMS PLEASE GIVE ME MY MURDER LADIES, and then it was not, injury tw, jon and martin are here but uhhhh Very faintly, this is NOT a fixit fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-17
Updated: 2020-09-17
Packaged: 2021-03-08 01:54:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 609
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26517808
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaijublood/pseuds/kaijublood
Summary: Family and blood are not the same. They're both warm, though, so Daisy can pretend.
Relationships: Basira Hussain/Alice "Daisy" Tonner
Comments: 11
Kudos: 24





	smokestack

**Author's Note:**

> written post-179

It’s hard to feel anything except the blood in her mouth, down her chin, staining her hands and forearms. It’s hard to think about what she must look like to the two figures, the huddling speckles in her vision, the two missing their third. 

One shouts something insignificant and the other speaks a word that takes such wicked shape in her mind that it causes her jaw to slack. The squirming body she had been holding falls to the ground with a slick sound like dropping a rotted fruit. A stifled groan slips from him.

“Daisy, stop, please!”

The word- no, _name_ \- brings Daisy’s focus to the woman who spoke it. She smells so much like pack, like family, and the metal machine in her arms does too. 

If she focuses, Daisy can see the woman and someone who must have been herself sitting thigh to thigh in the back of a van, surrounded by fellows similarly clad in black armor. They’re waiting for a briefing and most seem on edge, mouths pressed in firm lines, but the other woman is almost relaxed as her hands move over younger Daisy’s uniform, tightening straps and speaking in a low voice that only Daisy’s sharp ears can pick up. She can see the woman she once was try not to bask in the attention in front of their peers. Younger Daisy bends forward and laces the other woman’s boots.

Then it’s just the two of them exchanging sips of bitter-smelling coffee in a car with bars on the windows. The radio is running, but the words don’t make nearly as much sense as the way the other woman is almost smiling at her. Daisy can remember trying to mathematically parse out how similar this would feel to kissing her, holding their shared cup up to her mouth for those crucial extra moments that she never quite managed to feel ashamed of. 

Then they’re in a shabby but pin-neat apartment in Shepherd’s bush. The other woman’s stomach rises and falls evenly beneath younger Daisy’s head, and her hair is loose from its scarf, curling smokily over a pillow. Desperate to keep her eyes open, feel this for as long as possible, Younger Daisy engages in a brief but intense conflict with her heavy lids. She scores a few extra conscious moments surrounded by the scent of the other woman’s laundry detergent, collects them carefully for the cold and threadbare corner of her mind where she has started keeping things which make her feel human.

She doesn’t know when she stopped doing that.

“Basira.”

“Oh, God. Daisy.”

Her name on someone else’s lips feels more human than anything has in months. The bleeding man at her feet doesn’t hold even a matchstick to how brightly Basira burns, as though she is a brightly lit cabin in a forest on a stormy night. Daisy is soaked so thoroughly that she doesn’t know how she would even begin to get dry, but knocking on the cabin’s door and being engulfed by the widening beam of light as it opens seems like as good a start as any. 

Until she realizes the storm would follow her. That the storm _is_ her. Hurricanes are predictable in the sense that anyone with any sense would not invite them inside their home, and certainly not for a second, third, fourth, fifth time. Especially not one with a body count like Daisy’s, casualties stacked higher than woodfire smoke. There is no brightly lit cabin here, just a battered cottage with boarded up windows and a rifle stuck through the spyhole.

And a rifle stuck through the spyhole. 

_And a rifle-_


End file.
